The event was a great success, not least due to the wonderful setting -- and cuisine -- provided by Accademia Europea di Firenze. The papers presented represented a diverse, multi-disciplinary and growing field of research and many new friendships and collaborations were formed.

The full conference programme can be downloaded here. Curated tweets from the event can be found here. The conference was sponsored by the Sage publishers, Elon University, and the New Political Communication Unit. Special thanks to Laura Roselle and Elon University for making the conference happen.

Calm before the storm. The glamorous editorial team making name badges before the delegates arrive.

In order to hold their representatives to account, citizens need to know who they are what they do. In much of the world this information is hard to get. The EveryPolitician project (http://everypolitician.org/), run by UK-based civic tech pioneers MySociety, is gathering data on every politician in the world and makes it freely available in a consistent, useful format. What are the challenges of such a project? How is it even possible? How can data change the world? Who uses it? MySociety's Dave Whiteland tells the story of civic tech, open data, the technology of webscrapers and data pull requests. Featuring a tiny team of humans, 72,654 politicians (and counting), and one very busy little bot.

Popular and academic discourses characterize the effects of digital media as revolutionary, but the true effects are blurred by a multiplicity of studies with conflicting results. This meta-analysis project examines almost 300 studies conducted on the relationship between digital media use and participation in civic and political life across the globe. Unlike other meta-analysis in this field (Boulianne, 2009, 2015; Skoric et al., 2016 a,b), the focus of this analysis is at the study-level. The focus on study-level analysis, combined with a large sample of studies, allows for an examination of how the effects of digital media change across time and how the effects differ across the globe. As digital media use increases, are the effects growing? Do the effects increase gradually or is there a period marking a dramatic or revolutionary change in effects? Finally, to what extent can we discuss the global effects of digital media? Can the pattern of effects be explained by political system, the degree of press freedom, or geographic region? This research seeks to bring structure to the multitude of studies in this field of research and provide clarity in this area of research. Clarifying findings will help devise culturally-appropriate strategies to optimize the use of digital media in civic and political life. This research can inform civic organizations, governments and political campaigns' investments in digital media.

Shelley Boulianne is Associate Professor of Sociology at MacEwan University. She studies the impact of the internet on democratic practices, citizens’ engagement in deliberative events, and generational shifts in community attachment and social capital and its impact on patterns of civic and political engagement.

This week’s PIR Research Seminar will feature Akil N. Awan from Royal Holloway’s History Department and Newpolcom.

Akil N. Awan is Senior Lecturer in Modern History, Political Violence and Terrorism at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Senior Fellow with the Center for Global Policy. His research interests are focused around the history of terrorism, radicalization, social movements, protest, and new media. He has served in an advisory capacity to the United Nations, UNDP, UK Home Office, the Foreign Office, the US State Dept., the US Defense Dept., the US Military, Council of Europe, NATO and the OSCE amongst others. His books include Radicalisation and Media: Terrorism and Connectivity in the New Media Ecology (with Andrew Hoskins & Ben O’Loughlin: 2011, Routledge), and Jihadism Transformed: al‐Qaeda and Islamic State’s Global Battle of Ideas (2016, Hurst/OUP). He is on Twitter: @Akil_N_Awan

The seminar takes place on Tuesday 17 January in room FW101 and runs from 5.15 to 6.30. All welcome!

New and evolving technologies pose challenges for Political Communication research. Obstacles are encountered in investigations across a range of sub-fields, including emerging technologies, social movement organisations, party political communication, and privacy and surveillance. This event asks how, and if, we can overcome these problems through new methodological approaches.

This half-day workshop, funded by MeCCSA PGN, will comprise a masterclass by political communications specialist Gord Cameron (Press Officer and Senior Researcher, Greater London Authority) and Dr Jinghan Zeng (Lecturer in International Relations, Royal Holloway, University of London), followed by presentations and discussion by PhD candidates from the New Political Communication Unit in the Department of Politics and International Relations.

Tea and coffee will be served during the event, followed by a drinks reception from 6pm. The event is free and all students and staff are invited to attend.

On July 12 Professor Ariadne Vromen of the University of Sydney will present her ideas on the impact of social media and digital politics on the way in which advocacy organisations mobilise and organise citizens for political action.

SummaryThe emergence of social media and digital politics has changed the way advocacy organisations mobilise and organise citizens into political participation. The changes are due not only to technological advancement, but are also underpinned by hybrid media systems, new political narratives, and a new networked generation of political actors. One leading example, GetUp in Australia, has attracted 1 million members, and changed the Australian advocacy sector irrevocably to now focus on storytelling-driven campaigning with the everyday use of social media and digital tools. The talk will critically engage with these effects by highlighting the problematic mainstreaming of new norms such as entrepreneurialism and issue-driven politics.

Ariadne Vromen is Professor of Political Sociology in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sydney. Biographical details. Her research interests include: political participation, social movements, advocacy organisations, digital politics, and young people and politics. Ariadne has completed extensive research on young people’s political engagement, including a comparative project on social media use in Australia, the UK and USA; and co-authoring a policy report for the Australian National Youth Affairs Research Scheme. She is currently completing a book on digital citizenship and new advocacy organisations. In 2016 she starts a new project Crowdsourcing Political Engagement that looks at the growth of online petitioning and donations sites. She has also co-authored several texts on Australian politics, including Powerscape: Contemporary Australian Politics. Ariadne is a founding member of the Worldwide Universities Network group, Networking Young Citizens; and co-directs the Australian Political Studies Association Research Group, Political Organisations and Participation, see the blog: https://poppoliticsaus.wordpress.com

On Tuesday March 15, 2016 we host Phil Howard who will give a talk entitled, Will the “Internet of Things” set us free or lock us up?

Time: 5.15pm

Place: FW101

Professor Howard recently published a book exploring exactly this, Pax Technica (Yale University Press, 2015). He has just joined the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. His website can be found here.

On Thursday 3 March 2016 Ben O'Loughlin will lead a workshop on "New and Innovative Methods in Peace and Conflict Research" at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Hamburg. The goal of the workshop is to share with GIGA researchers an idea of how O'Loughlin and colleagues have been researching the media-security nexus through a series of funded projects since 2004. Analysing at this nexus has involved integrating ethnographic audience research, media text analysis, interviews with news producers, government security policymakers and military leaders, and various forms of digital and big data analysis. O'Loughlin will talk about the opportunities and pitfalls of piecing together such a holistic understanding of how media and security have become intertwined since the 2003 Iraq War, the war on terror and the more recent rise of ISIS. Practically, how do you research across a global multilingual media ecology? And politically, how can such research help show how media can be used to promote peace and dialogue rather than inflame anxiety and anger?